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Beginner's Guide
= Energy = Why do I need energy? If you need crytals for h-scenes, better gear or event ingredients, you need to play campaign stages (for ingredients event stages) and to be able to play them you need energy. Of course you don't technically need it if you like spending money and you are only here for h-scenes, but if you like to read story or you are free to play (f2p) player you'll definitely need it. When does my energy reset/fill up? 1 energy refills every 4 minutes, which means that in 1h you get 15 energy points, of course that is without VIP bonuses which can add a boost to gain energy faster. Whenever you level up, your energy fills up to your max energy. Unfortunately the energy won't pass the max energy. You can also get energy by using energy bags, which are currently obtainable only by maintenance of server as compensation. You can also choose to refill your energy for different prices. The best option is the one that costs 225 gems and you get 100 energy. Other options compared to this one are far more expensive (155% - 177% more) Best way to consume energy You probably noticed that when you level up you always get full energy based on your barracks and it doesn't go over that number when you level up. The best way to get the most out of your energy is to play regulary, but most people can only log in one or maybe two times a day, so what now? Well, if you see that you are close to level up, the best way to consume energy is to play maps that give less xp and on last 100xp to lvl up you fight the boss that consumes the most energy. If you don't want to manually search for those maps, look at the tables in Campaign. A general priority for spending energy can be taken as the following list. Note that some items (e.g. a quest for certain crystals) can easily be combined with either campaign progression and/or boss maps. #If a crafting event is active (and you can complete enough maps to get all materials in usable levels), do event maps. If a character event is active, do character objectives. #Do weekly objectives and quests (via boss maps first, then regular levels) #Progress in campaign maps #Prior boss maps #If you still have any energy, farm rare items for dust =Gems= Gems are currently the only in-game purchases beside bundles. Why do I need gems? For people that wants better gear, fast in-game progress or unlock maidens fast, you'll definitely need gems. They are used for opening gachas, where you can get gear or maidens, buying crystals, xp boost and multi build. You also use them to get more energy, coins, speed up building upgrades, and when you lose in battles you can extend time. They also increase your VIP level if you buy them. How do I get gems? You are probably thinking that the only way you get them is by purchasing them from the in-app store, but that is not the only option. You can easily get them by completing quests, trophies, collecting daily rewards or playing events. Best way to spend gems Most new players usually go and spend them all in the most useless ways such as buying more time on maps or buying 1x gachas or even speed up buildings, but none of those things are a good way to spend them. Later in the game you will struggle with upgrading buildings since it takes a lot of time to upgrade them, so the first thing you should spend gems on is the multi-build which will allow you to upgrade as many building as you want at the same time. You'll probably think what a moron you are but you'll definitely need this later if you don't want to spend weeks farming low level stages because your camps are too low to make through the level. If you really want to open gachas you should wait until you have enough to open 10x since you'll have better odds for getting good item/maiden. But you shouldn't waste them on normal gachas or premium since usually the most needed things is gear, so premium item gacha is the best option. If you have bought gachas you'll probably struggle to get through events since some of them require quite a lot of resources to get stuff, so the best way to spend gems is to not spend them since you'll need to buy energy during the events if you aren't the most active player and can't play more than 2 times a day. Don't waste gems at xp boosts or crystal packs since you'll get enough of that while playing the game, yes those options really help to speed up progress but they just aren't meant for free players. =Equipment= How do I upgrade equipment? Equipment is consumed when you want to upgrade other equipment, that means that you need lots of equipment. To upgrade it either go to your Inventory or Maidens, click a piece of equipment you want ot upgrade, click the upgrade button and choose the equipment you wish to destroy to upgrade the chosen equipment. Higher rarity/level gear increases upgrade progress more. For more informations see Upgrading Equipment. What equipment is the best for new players? Given the present maidens in the game, it takes about 7-10 normal attacks to take a maiden down on early levels, assuming that no elemental bonuses are in place. Compare the possible benefits of a common chest piece: * 10% Health This increases your health by 10% which means that your maiden will likely be able to take at least 1 additional hit. This additional hit may also buy you time to cast another spell or reposition your maidens. The % of your full health taken per average hit is decreased by about 9.1% for the first 10%, 8.3% for the next 10%, 7.7% for the next 10% etc. * 1% Dodge This gives you a 1% chance to avoid the damage of an autoattack. If it activates, you will survive for 1 additional hit, however, it is very unlikely to occur multiple times in a fight at such a low chance and mostly it will not activate at all. It also doesn't give you any benefits when facing skill damage. The % of your full health taken per average hit is decreased by 1%. * 100 Def This reduces all damage by 1%. Unlike Dodge this also applies to skills, however, there are few instances where the 1% will reduce the damage enough to make you survive an additional attack. The % of your full health taken per average hit is decreased by 1%. * 1 Attack Speed (AS) To benefit from attack speed you need to reach the next AS threshold. Here is a non exhaustive list: 45.5 47.7 50 52.7 55.6 58.9 62.5 66.8 71.5 77 83.4 91 100 111.2 125 142.9 166.7 200 250. It means that having 110 AS is like having 100 AS: you're wasting 10 AS. Either replace AS gear to get another stat or upgrade it to reach 111.2+. The actual DPS gain depends on the maiden. For example Helen adds an extra 0.2 sec delay to each auto attack while Kade adds an extra 0.5 sec delay. Let's say Helen goes from 107 to 112 AS: base delay goes from 1.0 sec (100 AS threshold) to 0.9 sec (111.2 AS threshold) and you add her extra 0.2 sec. So DPS gain is 1.2 / 1.1 = 9.1%. * 1% CDR (Cooldown reduction) Although not actually available on common chest pieces, CDR is not beneficial early on. Given the relatively short cooldowns of spells, it will hardly make a difference wether you can use a spell at 10s or at 9.8s, not to mention that you as a player likely won't be able to perfectly spam each ability on cooldown. Just as for Attack Speed, this stat isn't perceivable unless stacked to a certain point (10%+). If you are lucky to get all the CDR gear on Althea early on (Head, Weapon, Ring, Rare Shoes), getting a total of like 5% or so, you might have a slightly easier time spamming sufficient heal on boss fights but generally speaking, more Health on the tanking maiden will more than make up for the CDR. For Crit Chance vs Damage the same applies, as critical hits don't multiply your damage by 10 which would be a necessity to compete with Damage. * 1% Critical Hit (CH) Critical hit when activated can give 1.5x the damage that your maiden has, although in early stages this stat isn't beneficial, since dealing 50 more damage (if your maiden has base damage 100) per 100 hits doesn't really matter since the stages are usually allready completed before this activates. * 10% Damage This stat increases your damage by 1.1x. This means that instead of dealing only 100 damage you'll deal 110 damage per hit. This stat is also one of the better stats for early players and doesn't have random chances. :This means that the best equipment you can get as an early stages are health, defense and damage equipment since they are not based on random chances which in early stages doesn't really get in place. Of course common equipment isn't something you should really stick with for a long time and you should replace it with rare equipment as quickly as possible since it also gives 2 stats instead of 1. The most beneficial equipment is of course legendary or epic equipment which gives 3 stats. Item variability Items are available within a defined range of stats and so if you compare two of the same item you may find that one is substantially more powerful than another (for example, the common Warring Legion's Targe is available in a range of 8%-11.2% health). This difference in power will increase as the item is advanced in level (the Warring Legion's Targe will have a range of 40-56% health at level 5). For this reason, you can maximize the advantage when equipping your maiden by ensuring that the item is on the more powerful end of the available range. You will initially receive common items as rewards for winning battles, and at higher levels these rewards will be rare and even epic or legendary items. First concentrate on getting a full suit of armor (filling each slot) on your maiden. Keep in mind that there are usually at least two choices of available armor for each slot for each class of maiden and one of these might be more useful than the other, so don't automatically choose to keep the first item you find but make your choice based on the relative strengths of available items. Because Epic and Legendary items are only rarely available, most maidens will become equipped with suits of Rare items which are available via winning battles. Selecting your equipment carefully, choosing to equip items on the higher side of the available range, and advancing your equipment to the highest level will greatly increase your maidens power. Where can I get decent equipment? Unless you're lucky and get an epic head piece from your fourth free Gacha, you're stuck with common gear for a few exceptions until you approach Campaign 1 Level 40. As elaborated in the previous sections, pretty much all stats are ignorable on common gear, meaning that almost any gear farmed before that point is useless. Upgrading Equipment using common gear is fairly expensive in terms of coins so all you can really do is sell them, turn them into dust or potentially upgrading health/damage pieces to Level 2 (not recomended). As free Gachas aren't particularly generous in handing out Epic and Legendary gear, I'd recommend saving your gems and investing into the Premium Items Gacha. Getting any defensive piece is huge in tanking any of the boss fights and items also have the advantage of being interchangeable between maidens of the same class, not requiring you to level up an epic or legendary maid from scratch including romancing. The main difference really being the 200 gems here that you might have wasted if you don't get a maiden early on. Since PVP was released there is now Arena shop where you can buy Legendary, Epic or Rare equipment. Since being successful in PVP to gain tickets also requires decent gear, this isn't really an options for beginers, but you should at least collect those 500 tickets per day if you are in bronze. There is another option, which is by playing events that happen pretty much every month. If the event is not character event, you can get equipment by fusing x amount of ingredients together to gain that equipment, of course this usually means that you can't gain a maiden that is in that event without spending some gems. =Gacha= What is gacha? Gachas are basically loot boxes where you can get variable equipment, maidens or guardian shards. For more information visit Gacha. Which gacha should I open? We already explained that the best gacha to open is Premium Items gacha since later on you'll really need better equipment to get through the levels. But if you have money and you want new Maidens then 10x Premium gacha is for you. But since there is another option to buy gacha with orbs, which are gained by playing maps, it gives you lots of choices to buy gachas, of course the best one is still Premium Items gacha, but it is completely your choice which one you want to open. = Skill points= Skill points don't recharge as slowly as you think Generally speaking, you are limited in the amounts of silver and levels you can earn by using your energy. Your energy starts at 30 and 1 energy is regenerated in 5 minutes. 1 Skill point takes 20min to regenerate, meaning that you have 1 skill point/4 energy available. Now 4 energy is not enough to even play a level and you need 3 maiden level ups to unlock the next point. With increasing skill levels (let's say towards 10) the required silver also starts to become a huge factor in how frequently you can upgrade your skills. Overall this means that you don't need to invest any coins into the Research Academy at the start or even until later in the game because other factors will be more restricting in how quickly you upgrade. =Maidens= Where can I get them? The only way to get more Maidens is by opening gachas (not Premium Items), buying them in bundles or getting them in events. Which Maidens are the best? Currently top maidens are Isana, Beatrix, Althea, Roxelana, Jess, Daphne... You can better compare them in Maidens or on Riv's website. At first you should really stick with just one team and try to upgrade those maidens, even though they might not be the strongest or have good skills, but all that matters is level and equipment. =Maiden skills= Maiden skills scale incredibly during the first levels Maiden skills are absolutely monstrous for maidens between level 4 and ~20 as the damage/heal numbers of the skills scale up multiple times as quickly as the maidens health and damage. Example: Selena Lv4 has 1146 base health and deals 159 damage with an autoattack. The skill can be on Lv2 at that point and deal 580 damage (50.6% of max health). As immediately obvious, if you keep up with skills on your maiden level, you can oneshot squishy opponents with one skill. With rising skill level the silver costs start to become a burden though and as you fall behind, skills will feel a lot less impactful and you will have to rely more on autoattacks. Depending on your maiden you will find your maiden's autoattacks dealing as much damage as her skill and in other cases you might find your maiden's skill be much more impactful than her autoattacks (specifically utility skills). = Events = When starting out, occasionally events with new maidens will come up. There are two types, crafting events with their own map and some dialog/cutscenes, and maiden events where you are temporarily given access to a new maiden and need to use her in your team to hit personal and global goals. Crafting Events As a beginner it is usually difficult to farm enough crafting missions for the maiden or any item without throwing in some money. However, it is always worth it to play through the Easy mode as you will usually get 50 gems, 1 normal Gacha and 1 event Gacha from simply clearing each level once. This adds up to a value of 300 gems total, equaling 30,000 coins plus the level reward. Crafting events may also include craftable gem rewards, which may be worth completing, at least enough to use most of the resources one gets from doing the missions once each. There is also an event-specific Gatcha that may have an additional non-craftable new maiden, another 1 or 2 prior maidens, and additional gear (e.g. there may be Set gear pieces split between the craftable gear and the event gatcha). Depending on what is drawn from the crafting event gatcha may influence what is crafted, e.g. getting the event gatcha maiden may make crafting that maiden's gear more important than other items. Speaking very generally, rewards are typically crafted as follows: #Maiden - new first, then the other if you don't have her #Gear specific to the new maiden(s) #Other gear as desired #Gems Riv's website typically has an event calculator for crafting, based off the rewards from hard levels; direct links will usually be found pinned on the CM Discord general discussion tab. Maiden Events As a beginner, getting a new maiden event is advantageous since she will likely be epic or legendary, easily providing a power boost for completing campaign missions. Pay attention to the personal objectives (which will be set up in a similar manner to the standard weekly objectives) since in order to obtain the maiden at the end of the event, the personal objectives must be completed! For those willing to spend a little money, there will also be a set of premium objectives listed below the bar, again much like the weekly objectives but costing somewhat (4x, typically) more. There are also two other objectives: one personal milestone (e.g. on Kai, use her skill 900 times, or for Astrid, take 1.5 million damage) that will reward a quantity of gems, and global objectives for the mass completion of the personal milestones. One of the global objectives will be the one that allows the attainment of the maiden at the end of the event; the others are typically coins or gear usable only by that maiden.